Between Right And Wrong
by tryingthiswritingthing
Summary: What you need to learn, children, is the difference between right and wrong in every area of life—and once you learn the difference, you must always choose the right.
1. Isabel

**Author: this story was largely inspired by my friendship with two boys in high school. If any readers follow me on Tumblr, there's a vignette called 'The Mercenaries' posted there which, as you may have figured out, is also about them. I don't really get to see them these days so I write about them instead, I guess. I miss raising each other in the absence of reasonable authority figures; they were the most loyal friends that anyone could ask for. They'll probably never read this but if they do: guys, forgive me for unabashedly calling you dorks for years since now I sit here writing** ** _fanfiction_** **.  
** **Also, this one's for you.**

* * *

"Considering the rather inflexible time table that we've backed ourselves into, I'll make this brief. _This_ is the launch site. _There_ is the receiving party. That divot in the wood is the corner of North Limestone and East Sixth—we'll hold them there."

"Farlan, what's the tea?"

"...that's Levi's tea, Isabel."

"...oh. I knew that."

"Give me that before you spill it...shit's expensive."

"I'm not going to sp—"

"I agree with Farlan," the dark-haired man continued, his eyes narrowing as he examined the assembly of mismatched kitchenware strewn across the table. He took a lazy sip from the requisitioned tea cup. "East Sixth offers architecture that is favorable to the gear. North Limestone is often crowded enough that we can approach without a scene. It's an ideal spot if we want to make it quick...we always want to make it quick."

"East Sixth also is a one-way street," Farlan added. He grinned, wolfish. "If we come from behind, they might not see us until we're on top of them."

"That's...elegant," the man called Levi replied, nodding. "Show us what we need to do."

He rarely talked in singulars. Levi gave orders in terms of 'we' and 'us', Farlan obliged, and Isabel listened with wide, green eyes. As Farlan talked, crusts of bread became wagons and barricades. Crumbs became soldiers and civilians. Downed military police were eaten and Isabel licked the salt from her fingertips as she nodded along to the conversation and her heartbeat accelerated beneath her breast. Fear wasn't the name of the sensation that consumed her: it was the acute realization that every cell in her body smoldered with vitality. The sensation that struck at her ribs like a caged bird was the knowledge and the intensity of being present in the moment—of being alive.

Despite the energy that burned through her like fire, Isabel sat quietly: she was never more still than when Levi and Farlan were planning. There was something poetic about the manner in which they worked—something that made criminal behavior seem elegant and refined. She felt graceless in their wake: she ached to know what it was like to possess the airy, _lazy_ way with which the two men conducted themselves. Instead, she just listened, desperate to understand, and she was still listening when Farlan shook his head and looked towards a shuttered window as though he could see through it to the street beyond.

"If we're going to move, we need to leave now," Farlan said. "As I said...it's an inflexible agenda."

"Now..." Levi cast a wary glance around the room and exhaled; the hair that hung over his face caught his breath. "That's fine—it's going to have to be."

Levi rose from the table; Farlan followed him and they crossed the room. Isabel mimicked them both and she fell into step at their heels. The electricity of the situation made copying Farlan's long strides effortless and she kept pace with him easily as her lungs filled with the anticipation of flight.

x

She quickly exchanged bated breath for panting and a powerful stitch in her side—Isabel tripped over something obscured by the shadows of a crumbling building and cursed loudly.

For equipment so large, the omnidirectional maneuvering gear lacked proportional weight. For this, Isabel sent up a silent prayer of gratitude to gods that she did not believe in as she, Farlan, and Levi trekked through the back alleys of the underground. Their path led them up and down flights of chiseled stone steps, their boots catching on trash and the uneven cobblestone. Levi kept up a running stream of unabashed and passionate profanity under his breath, kicking aside glass bottles with a flagrant disregard for where they landed. When they finally emerged into the light at the end of a particularly foul stretch of street, Isabel was thoroughly disoriented by both their winding route and the smell of what she hazily recognized to be raw sewage.

The city narrows had deposited them onto a ridge on the outer limits of the underground. As Isabel peered over the edge, Farlan examined the sea of rooftops and archways and serpentine roads below.

"There—" he said suddenly, pointing. "That's North Limestone."

"The red roof...?"

"Yes, that's the one." Farlan inspected one cuff with an inordinate amount of curiosity before adding, "We should move, you know. If I had to estimate, we probably have...six minutes."

Isabel felt anxiety stab at her chest. "Are we going to make it?!"

"We're not going to if you keep asking dumb questions," Farlan replied, winking.

"Come on. Let's go." Levi had stepped forward, toes on the edge of the ridge, balanced and hawkish. He rocked back on his heels, back and then forward and then, soundlessly, he dropped into the void.

—and Isabel Magnolia knew her cue. She began to run along the uneven cobblestone sidewalk, arms extended like wings, eyes upturned to the expanse of rock overhead; her breath whistled in her throat as she found her stride and, closing her fingertips around the metal in her palm, she leapt.

The cable on her left hip caught first. For one stomach-turning, breath-stealing second, she was sideways—then her right side anchored, too. She somersaulted to slow her descent as she fell into oblivion; when she felt her feet come under her again, she leaned into her momentum, retracted, and fired again—her vision grayed at the edges from the force of her motion and she shut her eyes against the encroaching darkness.

When she opened them after a hazy fraction of a second, Farlan was at her side. His wires caught light, flashing bronze in the dim glow of the underground city.

"All right there...?"

He was close—Isabel could see that he was shouting, but his voice was almost lost in the wind. Breathless, nodded, but then Farlan wasn't beside her—he'd dropped below in an effortless flip and fell feet-first towards the streets below. As she watched, he raised a hand, caught a wire on a corbel at the corner of a building overhead, and rose upward in a graceful arc.

"Show-off—" Levi drawled: he had appeared at her side just as Farlan had. "You're okay, though, right?" he added, almost conversational, and he seized Isabel's wrist, pulling her with him into his descent.

"I was great before you started hauling on me," Isabel snapped, twisting against their motion as they fell.

"Keep up, then," Levi replied. "Also, keep your pants dry."

He let go as quickly as he had taken hold. She dropped several alarming feet before—

 _Look. Use the space. Going down, down, down; don't want to go down—look up; what's up_?

— _the corner_.

In her mind's eye, she saw Farlan's motion, singular and fluid. She lifted a hand, forced herself to look away from the ground that was approaching a bit too quickly, lifted her eyes to the same richly-decorated corner of the building that Farlan had exploited, took a breath...and fired.

With a jolt that pulled her as much sideways as vertically, Isabel rocketed upwards. She flew past Levi and Farlan and, though somewhat aware of a complaint singing in her shoulder, grinned wildly at the ceiling as speed stung at her eyes. She felt her back arch; she slowed her motion in a somersault— _release, click, contact, lean_ —and allowed herself to drop once more, this time much more comfortably, between Levi and Farlan.

"That...was...amazing!" Isabel shouted into the wind.

"It was okay," said Farlan, eyes glinting.

"You loved it," Isabel asserted stubbornly. "Levi did—didn't he?"

" _Tch_..." he said, and though the sound was one of condescension, the features of his usually impassive face suggested familial pride as they descended into the center of the city.

x

The ODM gear whirred and hissed but made little more noise than that. Wind rumbled in their ears as the trio cut through the air like birds, swift and dark and almost silent. The buildings became closer together, the shadows grew long, and they eventually settled on the red-shingled roof of the church on North Limestone. Isabel landed in a low crouch: as she straightened, joints creaking in protest, she caught movement on the edge her of vision.

It was Levi; he was running. When he reached the edge of the building, he dropped to all fours, bent low—Isabel watched him scan the streets below with an unreadable expression. The way that he had moved and now his stance: both were predatory, feral...she felt a shiver creep down her spine. Sometimes she forgot that she shared her life with someone more hunter than human, especially when he was perched six stories up from the world.

"Do you see them, Ani?" The question escaped Isabel's lips in a whisper before she could stop it.

"Yeah..." Levi said, his voice low. "They're going to be late, though—still at least a couple of minutes out..."

Farlan snorted. "Well, that's rude of them, making us rush."

"What are we going to do?" Isabel asked.

"We'll do what we said that we were going to," said Levi shortly, backing away from the edge of the roof. He straightened and brushed at the dust on his dark pants. "We relay as Farlan recommended. He's first—I'm last."

"We rendezvous at Chestnut Street," Farlan added. "There's plenty of architecture that favors us between here and there...good to lose anyone who actually thinks that they can keep up."

"We drop our product there. We go home. Don't make it complicated."

"They're coming now," said Isabel. She could now see a horse-drawn wagon loaded with crates and it was trundling along the street below; the vehicle had turned onto their block at the other end of the lane. It was driven by a man with a scarf pulled over his face and he was escorted by two individuals that Isabel immediately recognized to be members of the military police: both soldiers were armed. The edge was beginning to return to her senses; her heartbeat quickened again as the emotion came rushing back—no fear, only wonder.

"Farlan first..." Levi repeated. "You both know what to do. Don't be greedy."

"Don't take more than you can carry," Farlan intoned lazily.

"Don't get killed," Isabel finished, plucking a spot of lint from her sleeve.

"—and don't act bored when I tell you that every single time that we have a job...I'm trying _very_ hard to keep you two idiots alive." Levi sniffed, returning to the edge of the roof. Isabel took her place on his left, Farlan on his right.

"Hold."

Levi crouched low like a runner about to sprint; Farlan set his stance wide and rolled each of his shoulders in turn.

"Hold."

Isabel didn't know which of the two to copy so she settled for both. The result made her feel awkward and off-balance.

" _Hold_..."

Her chest was tight with fire; her fingertips trembled on her triggers. _Hold, hold, h—_

" _Move_!"

Her fingers closed on the metal in her palm as she felt her friends explode into motion beside her. Isabel dropped off the roof and her sight locked onto her target and she indulged herself in some speed as she shot, feet-first, in a graceful downswing. She hit a crate on the wagon—the one that was the second from the top—at full-force. The shock reverberated pleasantly through her legs; she felt athletic and flexible—loose. There was a certain weightlessness that came from the combination of the gear and the new fitness acquired in learning to use it and she reveled in it; she felt fiery and alive as she applied some gas to her ascent and looked for somewhere to land. A building with a second-story balcony caught her eye and— _release, click, contact_ —she felt uneven stone beneath her feet.

She turned around to examine the scene below and drunk in a street enveloped in chaos. Levi was engaging a disarmed military officer; there was a line of blood running from his hairline but he was spinning a knife in his right hand with savage precision. The other soldier was nowhere to be seen but Isabel did see a suspicious pair of legs half-visible from behind one of the crates that lay broken open in the street. The driver was beneath the wagon itself now with his hands over his ears, eyes squeezed shut—

"Catch it!"

Isabel turned just in time to be hit in the face with a paper-wrapped parcel. It was tied with twine and she fumbled to catch it as Farlan shot by the windows on the floor over her head.

"Relay!" he shouted, catching a wire and making a second pass at Isabel's balcony. "Our hosts seem to have only featured one act this evening—should be a short party! Move—we'll see you later!"

"Right—" Isabel tucked the package under her right arm and vaulted over the railing—

— _Chestnut Street_ —

—and fired her left cable over her head.

x

Their bizarre games of pass-the-parcel often went this way. Farlan's relay system had run quite a few packages through the streets of the underground and it wasn't a technique inclined towards failure. Poverty failed to beget formal education and the result was that there weren't many crooks and cut-throats who could rival Farlan's ingenuity.

One hook caught the overhang of an apartment block and Isabel spun upwards at a dizzying speed. Her eyes stung with tears as she reached the height of her arc and allowed herself to fall back towards the buildings below, towards a second-story balcony—

—whose door was open to reveal the half-profile of a soldier cocking a rifle—

 _No_ —

—and she instead cut her gas cold, crossed her arms over her face, and hadn't quite finished bracing herself when she crashed into the gray-shingled roof of an apartment block.

Isabel rolled over, winded, but found that she didn't have time to breathe—the low whirl of ODM gear was somewhere, out of sight but far too near, and she clambered to her feet in a few jolting movements that made her head swim.

She ran hard, veering to the left. The change of direction wasn't intentional but served her well: peering over the edge of the building, she found what she was looking for and Isabel fell onto a top-story balcony just in time to almost take out a redheaded man who was withdrawing into the building's interior.

"I'm sorry!" she gasped reflexively, but the pursuers were growing louder so she vaulted over the railing and let a hook find the corner of a roof below without looking back.

Isabel dropped into a dark alley between a market and an abandoned something-or-other. The shadows were long and it was quieter here, but she had heard Levi talk about how buildings muffled sound often enough to know that the peacefulness of the city narrows was an illusion. She took off down the lane towards the brassy light at the end and was deposited out into a wide street populated by quiet pedestrian traffic.

Reason told her not to make a scene, but adrenaline and pain and a vague sense of greater purpose suggested otherwise and that was how Isabel Magnolia, standing four feet and eleven inches in mismatched socks, made her next decision. She fired a hook into the wall of a stone tower and it caught between two sixth-story windows; her feet had just left the ground when she heard the shouts of men behind her—

" _There they are_!"

"Oh, come _on—_ " Isabel spat. White spots danced in front of her eyes.

Women pulled their wide-eyed children from the street and men shielded their eyes as they backed towards the safety of the shops and lobbies along the sidewalk. Two soldiers were running along the streets, their arms extended, and Isabel had only a quick glance over her shoulder to take all of this in—looking back made her too nauseated and she turned instead towards the great expanse of ceiling overhead and focused on maintaining her sense of direction.

 _Click, contact, lean, gas, swing, release, click, contact, lean—fuck_.

The buildings seemed farther apart now, somehow; the gaps between ledges and rooftops were harder to bridge as her muscles whined and ached. Her mind seemed slower; it was becoming increasingly difficult to find her next target until she was right on top of it—but Chestnut Street was still several blocks off and she hadn't seen Levi or Farlan for some minutes now and for the first time on any job that the trio had taken on, she craved their interference: the stitch in her side was back and it bit with every breath. Isabel felt her pursuers rather than saw them—she knew that they were behind her, somewhere in the shadows of tall buildings and human suffering, but the speed at which she was traveling exhausted her body; there was no energy left to turn around.

She emerged from an open window of an abandoned structure. The sudden light caused the spots in her vision to swell, blinding her, and instead of jumping into space, Isabel inhaled, bracing herself against a powerful wave of vertigo. She swung her feet over the balcony's edge and her fingertips wrapped around the banister. Gripping it for all that her life was worth, she swung her legs into the open air once, twice, before she let herself fall towards a narrow ledge below. Gravity pulled her forward, down; she felt her feet fall from under her and she cartwheeled in space—

She was falling. Isabel struck out with a weightless hand and her nails scraped the stone facade of the crumbling tower, finding no purchase—she kicked out with her feet, desperate for traction, but then her feet were above her and windows flashed past the edges of her vision as the speed of freefall robbed her of her breath.

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 **Author: on Wednesdays, we wear pink. On Mondays, we update.**


	2. Levi

"I don't understand."

"You passed out."

"I—"

"Farlan caught you. It was actually quite impressive."

Isabel blinked several times, pupils dilating as her eyes adjusted to the dimness. "I...don't understand," she repeated slowly.

"Did you hit your head on the way down or do you just like repeating yourself?"

She felt small in his arms. Her smallness made something in him stir and Levi found himself torn between revulsion and fascination, disgusted by her fragility and...curious, maybe, or confused because it _was_ confusing, how was she able to make him feel protective...as though he, of all people, would be the one to protect someone.

"I saw you, Ani," Isabel said dazedly. Her eyes were unfocused.

"Isabel...what are you talking about?" Levi's tone was more even than his pulse.

"I saw you," she repeated, more insistently. "That day...you jumped from the West Tower."

Levi blinked for a moment before the event in question sprung to mind; he almost snorted with laughter in his sudden relief. It seemed so long ago.

"You must have fallen a hundred feet before you caught a wire..." Isabel persisted, enunciating each word with a clarity that made the tension in Levi's neck and shoulders ease. " _You_ didn't pass out."

Levi felt the corner of his mouth twitch. "Falling doesn't make you faint."

It had been in the early days of their ODM gear experimentation—days that Levi and Farlan had spent fighting the grayness that encroached on the edges of their vision and taking turns vomiting over rooftop edges. After accruing a lifetime of injuries over the course of a few months, they graduated onto what Farlan referred to in mixed company as 'the great game'. The law just called it theft.

The pair of them had found themselves separated within minutes the very first time—things seemed to happen faster so far above the ground. Levi could still vividly recall the rush of being pursued straight into the shadow of the clock tower; the memory of the chase still made the hair on the back of his neck stand on end. He had just smashed through the remaining panes of a broken window when he saw, in his peripheral vision, his gear's gas needle dip precariously low. He listened; the acoustics of the empty stone room were atrocious but yes—there was still at least one person following him. The whir of the ODM gear grew louder and louder: at _least_ one and maybe more—

He had jumped from the twelfth story. It had seemed like a good idea at the time—freefall certainly had a way of covering ground. He wasn't very far above the sidewalk when he managed to catch a line and avoid breaking every bone in his body. It was a damn good thing that it had happened, too—because not even Levi Ackerman, for all of his peculiarity, could have survived that.

—because he was peculiar. It was hard to ignore, really; he had for some time suspected that there was something special about him—some physical attribute or a trick of the senses that he hadn't yet learned the name of or been able to explain. It was something primitive and unsettling and, if he was honest with himself ( _really_ honest, like with the kind of honesty that got more noble men killed), it was _thrilling_. He would be lying through his teeth if he told anybody that he could imagine a smuggler's life without it—but Isabel didn't have to know about the drugs.

"Falling doesn't make you faint," Levi repeated. The sound of his voice and his footfalls on the pavement grounded him among the lengthening shadows once more. "You can drop a hundred feet—five hundred feet, probably—over and over again without losing consciousness. It's not the fall that made you pass out—it was the fear."

"I wasn't afraid," Isabel snapped back, bristling.

"You were," Levi jibed. He almost smiled when he saw the sullen defiance coloring Isabel's expression, but he resisted the urge. "Look, being afraid isn't necessarily a bad thing. It helps us to not be idiots...keeps us alive."

"Somehow, I don't think that falling fifty feet is going to keep me alive." Isabel's voice was laced with skepticism.

Levi couldn't hold the snort in any longer: she was a funny girl. "You didn't spontaneously faint because of a fear of heights or any shit like that. Something happened and you started to fall because of that... _then_ you passed out. I've heard that the head will sometimes stop people from being conscious to experience things that it'd be healthier for to not remember—like falling."

"Oh..." Isabel leaned into his shoulder. He could feel her breath through the worn places on his shirt sleeve—Christ, she was small. "Does it happen to you, then?"

"I suppose that it could."

It was a tricky subject.

x

It was evening. The streets were dark and quiet and still. Isabel's eyes were drifting closed with increasing frequency and Levi gave her arm a squeeze as he turned down an alleyway at the bottom of a sloping, narrow lane. The lighting changed here and while Levi had seen darker nights, the long shadows made it easy for him retreat to the hazy, dusky corners of his mind—the place where doubt lurked.

Levi hadn't wanted to tell them. Farlan had figured it out, of course—Farlan, for his flaws, could untangle just about anything once he worked up the nerve to try. Levi had expected that—perhaps not as quickly, but it hadn't been a surprise.

Isabel was another matter. She wasn't clever in the way that Farlan was—couldn't problem-solve if her life depended on it. She was loud and brash and there were small animals scurrying through the gutters with a longer attention span. With that said, Levi found her to be a determined student if not a particularly prodigious one: she learned half as quickly as he wanted her to but tried three times as hard. She was as gentle as she was fierce, too—that kindness was the great enigma. It frustrated him: it was so unfair that of all of the people in the world, above and below the ground, he was the one entrusted with safeguarding someone so rare and precious—someone that looked at him as a brother.

Levi could still feel her breath on his skin."Uh...how do you feel?"

"My mouth feels awful," Isabel replied groggily.

"You vomited while you were out. It happens. Don't worry about it."

 _"_ Okay... _ugh_ , that's pretty gross."

"You're telling me."

Isabel craned her neck to study the deserted lane that sprawled ahead of them. "Hey, Ani...where's Farlan?"

"He went on ahead with your gear," Levi answered. He'd somehow known what her next question would be before it escaped her lips: maybe that was what being someone's brother was about.

"Is it okay? Is he okay?"

"It's all fine. I told you—he caught you."

"...right," Isabel said, but her tone relayed that she had no recollection of such information.

"It's fine if you don't remember...I told you earlier."

"I really don't remember at all...where are we now?"

Levi screwed up his eyes against the gathering darkness. He had been traveling on instinct more than sight and it took him a minute to orient himself before replying, "Bryan Avenue—we'll be back soon."

The place where doubt lurked was shadowed, but substantial; Levi felt Isabel's breath on his shoulder again and the smallness of her everything and the crushing weight of a responsibility that he had never signed up for and frankly did not deserve.

"Look," Levi said, his tone even. "I have to ask. What happened?"

Isabel looked up at him, green eyes glassy with either fatigue, guilt, or a combination of both. "I just...I was so _tired_."

 _I thought so._

What looked like uninhibited freedom to the untrained eye was in actuality a study in balance, of course—the gear was no toy or hobby. Its use was a tremendous gamble at even the most elementary level. It was easy to forget what other people were like—the limits of what their bodies could do.

"You have to be strong if you're going to be able to use the gear for even short periods of time," Levi said. "It's not like playing at gymnastics or dancing or whatever other hobbies that you may think of. It's very physical—very difficult. You need to be stronger and that's going to take work. It's going to hurt. You're going to hate it."

"Are you mad?" She was looking up at him, eyes shadowed with what was definitely more guilt than exhaustion, he realized.

"You're damn lucky to be alive," Levi muttered, looking away, but a corner of Isabel's mouth twitched somewhere on the edge of his vision.

A gas lamp burned low at the corner of Bryan Avenue and Bryan Station. Levi halted in the roadway and watched his shadow mimic him, sprawling across the cobblestone with too-long limbs. "We're basically home," he said, eyes narrowing against what loomed beyond the circle of light. "Do you want to walk?"

"I'd _love_ to," Isabel answered, so Levi let her down gently. She swayed on the spot for a moment with her arms slightly extended from her sides, palms facing downward.

"Are you able?" Levi reached for her shoulder, but Isabel shrugged away.

"I'm fine, really—I'm just so tired and I have a lot on my mind."

"What are you thinking about?"

"Well... _why_ were they ready for us?"

Isabel had taken a few tentative steps forward but she had stopped again and was looking back over her shoulder at him; Levi could feel the heat of her frustration from where he stood.

"They weren't ready for us," Levi responded. "They were just less stupid than usual."

"I don't know," Isabel said suspiciously. "It just felt like an ambush. I wouldn't put it past some of our neighbors to work alongside the military if it meant our heads on the chopping block."

"If it was an ambush courtesy of the Underground, you wouldn't still be alive to muse on it. No, the military was just fortunate this time...used up all of that good fortune for next time, probably. We can't win all of them. Neither can they."

"It is really a shame that we lost that package—I didn't even know what was in it."

"That's not important," Levi responded, possibly too quickly, but Isabel didn't seem to notice.

"I _hate_ it when we don't deliver," Isabel spat, kicking at a chipped flagstone and tripping over it a bit in her dizziness. "It makes us look so bad. We _failed_."

"Eh...we didn't."

It had been smart of Farlan to announce his presence before showing himself; regardless, Levi still felt ready to leap out of his own skin, despite the familiarity of the voice, as their companion dissolved out of an alleyway off to the right-hand side of the road.

"I collected the package from you along with your gear and went on a little bit of a road trip," said Farlan, smoothing his visibly-windswept hair. "I've been waiting here for some time—don't think that anyone bothered to follow."

"How sure are you?" Levi pressed, staring into the darkness. In the gloom, every irregularity of shadow looked like an armed man in a crouch.

"Well, if they made themselves obvious this game would be a lot less challenging, wouldn't it?" Farlan snorted. "All said, I'm bushed. I really did look and now I'd like a good sit-down."

"We were just getting to that," Isabel chirped. "How nice of you to join u—"

"Watch her," Levi interjected. "She probably hit her head on something. Don't let her fall on her ass."

"I can probably do that," Farlan replied with a wink. "Let's go, princess."

"I'm quite fine on my own!" Isabel insisted, swaying a bit as she ducked Farlan's outstretched hand, and Farlan snorted audibly as he and Levi followed her crooked course into the gathering night.

x

The layout of the city flat was simple and open: the trio entered into a broad front room that played a variety of roles with a utilitarian simplicity. Exposed rafters intersected overhead—instead of a second floor, the space was open and would have been airy and bright if not for the shuttered windows. The windows were always shuttered, though—that was their way.

Isabel was kicking off her left boot in the doorway; the right one had bounced across the floor. Levi picked it up and tossed it back towards her, a reprimand on his lips, but Isabel had already moved on blithely: the slight skip was returning to her step and she was now hovering over Farlan's shoulder. He was seated at the table where only a few hours before they had been illustrating their intentions with assorted kitchenware.

"What happens now?" Isabel asked, watching Farlan stack plates and match silverware into sets.

"I'm going to take a look at your gear," Farlan replied without looking up from the messy table. "I don't think that you hit anything on the way down...minus your head...but it could hardly hurt to take a look. It would be better to find a problem while sitting at the dinner table than forty feet above the ground."

"Ooh, show me—"

"Before anything else happens—" Levi interjected. "I think that Isabel should have the opportunity to lie down."

"I don't want to," Isabel huffed.

"Rest."

"I'm hungry!"

"Rest," Levi repeated as he fell into a kitchen chair beside Farlan, his tired eyes immediately threatening to close. "Then, we'll eat."

x

Isabel and Farlan spent the majority of dinner roundly abusing the Military Police while Levi alternated between picking at a half-loaf of bread and the dirt under his nails. The atmosphere was familial and familiar and warm: the food was less than fascinating, but there was enough.

It was easy to forget, especially in times like this, that they were not a family sitting down to a normal dinner—that there was not even a notion of normality from their collective past for them to latch onto and maintain. They lived on edge...in a constant state of low-key neurosis...in the gap that stretched between right and wrong.

Maybe that expanse didn't exist at all and they simply lived with a foot in each world.

Farlan was talking, loudly, and both he and Isabel missed the sound of a knock on the door behind a particularly well-enunciated expression of 'son of a bitch'. Levi did not, however, and he raised a hand along with one thin brow. Farlan fell silent immediately, eyes widening slightly.

"There's someone at the door."

"I didn't hear anything," Isabel said, voice uncharacteristically low. "Are you sure?"

"One way to find out..."

"We made a scene earlier," Levi muttered. "I'm sure that some charmer wants us to either adopt them, work for them, or give ourselves up to them...and frankly, though all options suck ass, I'd almost prefer the latter."

"Guess it's a good thing that that's the most likely..."

"What are we going to do?" Isabel whispered. Her freckles stood out strikingly on her pale skin.

Levi nodded to Farlan. "Don't get shot."

"Ah, yes...it _is_ rude to keep a guest waiting," said Farlan, rising. "Are you armed?"

"Do you have a pulse?"

"No need to be clever, Levi...mind yourselves, now," Farlan replied airily, creeping towards the doorway and stepping over Isabel's discarded shoes en route.

Isabel's knuckles turned white on the table's edge, Levi's hand went to his boot and, with a waggish grin over the shoulder, Farlan opened the door.


End file.
